A term first used and explained by Gartner over 5 years ago, digital dexterity has evolved from a forward-looking idea to a must-have organizational capability. Today, businesses that embed it early in the employee experience aren’t just improving tool adoption, they’re accelerating business transformation.
To build this capability effectively, it’s critical to focus on the very start of an employee’s journey – onboarding. When designed with intent, onboarding sets the tone for how employees engage, learn and adapt with technology. It should go beyond a simple welcome process and serve as the true starting point for developing digital dexterity.
If digital fluency isn’t built from day one, both employees and the business risk falling behind.
The Business Case for Early Digital Dexterity
According to our latest research, 95% of leaders believe that digital dexterity is important to their organization’s success, but why is it the case that only 47% believe their employees can adapt to the next wave of technologies? This isn’t just a skills gap, it's also a leadership gap.
Digital dexterity must be led from the top. Leadership plays a critical role not just in deploying tools, but in fostering a the right mindset across the organization. To build a workforce that thrives with technology, leaders must clearly communicate why digital dexterity matters and how it impacts every role. With emerging technologies rapidly transforming organizations, there’s hardly a role untouched by the need for digital dexterity in an organization, and this needs to be heard.
Too often, leaders focus on digital capability only after habits are already formed, which is a critical misstep. Leaders must shift their mindset from seeing digital dexterity as a reactive fix to embedding it proactively throughout the employee journey. This means prioritizing early skill development and fostering a culture where continuous learning is central to organizational success.
Who Should Lead Digital Dexterity?
For a long time, the ownership of who drives digital dexterity has been unclear, and without this, building the capability has been extremely difficult. Traditionally, IT has focused on the operational performance of business systems, while HR has overseen workforce skill development, leaving digital dexterity to fall between the cracks.
As organizations evolve, the lines between departments are blurring, and this is particularly evident between HR and IT. In fact, 94% of IT leaders believe digital transformation will lead to new, converged departments like HR-IT within the next five years.
It’s clear that digital dexterity can no longer be owned by one singular team. It must be co-owned and driven by close collaboration between HR, IT, as well as business leadership. Only through shared accountability can organizations embed digital dexterity at scale and make it a lasting capability.
The Digital Dexterity Blueprint
There are three main steps that organizations can take to embed digital dexterity into the core of their business function.
1) Align: Bridging the HR-IT Partnership
With 58% of organizations still reporting unclear ownership between HR and IT, silos continue to create confusion, duplicated effort, and missed opportunities. To embed digital dexterity from day one, HR and IT must operate as a collaborative, unified force.
Digital dexterity thrives when both teams co-own the employee experience, bringing together people, culture, tools, and training into one seamless vision. Alignment isn’t optional, it’s a must.
2) Activate: Elevating Onboarding
Onboarding is the first chance to shape digital behavior before habits are formed. However, many onboarding programs are often reduced to a checklist of administrative tasks like setting up logins and reviewing policies, but viewing onboarding this way is a missed opportunity.
Creating a digitally fluent workforce begins with an onboarding experience that’s engaging, intuitive, and built around real workflows. When HR and IT design onboarding together, they move beyond task completion and toward long-term capability building – a view shared by 95% of leaders, who say better onboarding starts with deeper HR-IT collaboration.
3) Adopt: Empowering Digital Adoption
Digital tools alone don’t drive transformation, people do, and adoption doesn’t happen through tech rollouts alone. HR and IT must work together to prioritize digital adoption and create an adoption framework that’s proactive.
Success means treating every rollout like a change campaign and providing the necessary support that would go with it. When done well, this continuous support and enablement turns onboarding into momentum, and momentum into lasting transformation.
Driving Digital Dexterity
Forward-thinking leaders are already reassessing their business models to prioritize digital dexterity, not as a one-off initiative, but as a key cultural piece. It must be championed from the top and reinforced at every touchpoint, from onboarding to ongoing development.
According to Gartner, organizations with high digital dexterity are 3.3 times more likely to succeed in their digital transformation efforts. As business success increasingly relies on a digitally fluent workforce, it’s essential for leaders to prioritize this from day one, not as an afterthought.
Embedding digital dexterity early is the key to long-term competitiveness and a workforce ready for the future of work.
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Download The Science of Productivity Report – Part 2, ‘The Experience Silo: HR, IT, and the Digital Workplace’.
And Part 1, ‘Transformation: Driving Adoption Productivity, and Change in the AI Era’.